Do black faculty members face discrimination in promotion and tenure? One might think this a simple question with an objective answer. The answer could be, “Yes. Black faculty members face invidious racial discrimination.” Or it might be, “Yes. Black faculty members are beneficiaries of lower standards based on favorable racial discrimination.” Or, yet again, it could be, “Both kinds of discrimination occur, sometimes in the same institution, and both can be hard to document.” Then again still, the answer might be, “Racial discrimination in faculty promotion and tenure is rare and exceptional.”
This is a topic on which I have done no original research, though that doesn’t stop me from having an opinion, based on some 50 years of my life spent in and around colleges and universities. Let me put that opinion out in the open so that no one need invoke “implicit bias.” Every college or university I enrolled in as a student, worked in as a faculty member or administrator, or examined as an accreditor or researcher was strongly dedicated to opposing invidious racial discrimination but was lenient towards black faculty members who fell short of prevailing standards. Often, no leniency was needed, but sometimes it was. A black faculty member might be extended extra time on his tenure clock, granted a reduced course load in order to complete a book manuscript, or given special consideration for exceptional teaching or “service to the community.”
I concede the possibility that there are pockets of anti-black bigotry somewhere in the American academy. But frankly I doubt it.I seldom saw such leniency extended to anyone else, and I never heard anyone in the academic community take exception to it. The prevailing sentiment, whether in a small liberal-arts college or a major research university, was always that it was morally right and socially wise to “go the extra mile.”
It is possible that my experience was exceptional. My entire career has been spent in the Northeast. I concede the possibility that there are pockets of anti-black bigotry somewhere in the American academy. But frankly I doubt it. The American academy is essentially one place, despite its division into thousands of colleges and universities, each with some distinctive character. Overriding those distinctions is a common culture that reviles invidious racial discrimination.
What then to make of the research report in the journal Nature Human Behavior, in which 10 academics (one from California, seven from Texas, and two from Louisiana) purport to show a racial double standard that impedes the success of black scholars in American higher education? The article is unambiguously titled: “Underrepresented Minority Faculty in the USA Face a Double Standard in Promotion and Tenure Decisions.”
To unravel this, we have to start with some translation. The topic is not black faculty but “Underrepresented Minority Faculty” or URMs. Who qualifies as a URM? That requires some digging, but a key to one of the tables explains that URMs come in two separate categories coded as “ones” and “zeros.” Black/African American and Hispanic individuals are coded as “ones,” and white/Caucasian and Asian/Asian Americans are coded as “zeros.” But women are coded as “ones,” as well, and men are coded as “zeros.” The double coding allows URMs who are women to be captured for their “intersectionality.”
The research focuses on promotion and tenure (P&T) decisions at five universities and entails 1,571 faculty members. And the key finding, presented in the abstract, is that “P&T decisions show that URM faculty received 7% more negative votes and were 44% less likely to receive unanimous votes from P&T committees.”
Let’s note straightaway that these figures, even taken at face value, do not add up to denials of promotion or tenure to URM candidates. On their face, the figures mean merely that some committee members had doubts about the qualifications of some candidates. A non-unanimous decision does not mean a negative decision. So we might want to know how many of these candidacies eventuated in actual negative decisions.
These figures, even taken at face value, do not add up to denials of promotion or tenure to minorities.To understand this, one must know that the tenure-and-promotion committee vote is not the final decision. That usually belongs to the provost, although often it must be ratified by the president and the university’s board. So what did the provost decide in these cases? Read deeply enough into the article, and you will find the observation, “We found no evidence for a direct effect of URM status on the provost vote.” Provosts were, however, affected by negative recommendations from committees, both in the form of split votes within the committees and unanimous votes.
If you have stopped reading my article at this point, I can hardly blame you. The 10 scholars who devoted considerable effort to compiling and analyzing their data give the appearance of having bored a deep well in search of the underground river of anti-URM discrimination, only to find nothing but dry sand. To the extent that a small percentage of URM individuals fare a little worse than non-URM individuals in tenure and promotion decisions, this could be due to a variety of factors other than invidious racial (or intersectional) discrimination. It might be due in some instances, for example, to candidates who have been beneficiaries of lower standards of vetting at earlier gateways in their careers. Possibly they have “failed upward” until they have reached the point where the institution is compelled to impose a real standard.
To mention that possibility, of course, is to invite indignation. And indignation is really what this whole article is about. Its opening sentences set out a series of unqualified declarations about the injustice of American higher education, and I can do no better than quote the first paragraph:
The academic community is not representative of the society it serves. In the USA, of the 840,000 full-time faculty at degree-granting postsecondary institutions, academics are disproportionately white or Asian (82%) relative to the US population (66%). This overrepresentation corresponds to a staggering underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic individuals, who make up 31% of the US population but only a tenth of faculty appointments at institutions of higher education.
Every one of these declarations is questionable. The academic community doesn’t and shouldn’t “represent” society by means of ethnic mirroring. Why are whites and Asians lumped together? What is “disproportional” about the ethnicity of that 82 percent who have selected themselves for hard, often disappointing, and underpaid careers in the academy? Are you “staggered,” as the authors are, by learning that only a tenth of black and Hispanic URMs have faculty appointments? How does this compare to black and Hispanic performance on eighth-grade NAEP reading assessments, high-school graduation, and graduation from college in rigorous academic fields?
To ask questions is, in the minds of the investigators, to perpetuate the inequality that harms aspiring minority academics.Of course, to ask such questions is, in the minds of these investigators, to perpetuate the inequality that harms aspiring URM academics. What is needed, in their view, is a new set of standards that rewards the “lived experience” of URM academics and takes into account their “intersectional identities.” They have been “disadvantaged by admissions processes at elite universities that privilege legacy admissions and donors as well as students who have greater access to resources designed to help them succeed in the admissions process.”
I would wager, in fact, that the beneficiaries of legacy admissions and “greater access to resources” who leverage their way into undergraduate colleges this way are very unlikely to be the junior academics in their thirties who are aspiring for tenure. That’s a steep hill of meritocracy that is successfully climbed by only a few, regardless of race, ethnicity, or sex. It requires a combination of talent and tenacity. Of course, there are alternative paths smoothed for some by fields of study in which conformity to an ideology trumps actual achievement. Think of it as the Claudine Gay path to the summit.
The Nature Human Behavior article, however, never glances in that direction.
Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars.